There’s a Southern proverb often attributed to Sam Rayburn: “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” One month into the Trump presidency, and it’s still unclear whether the Democratic Party will learn anything from a fourth kick.

For four straight election cycles, Democrats have ignored research from the fields of cognitive linguistics and psychology that the most effective way to communicate with other humans is by telling emotional stories. Instead, the Democratic Party’s affiliates and allied organizations in Washington have increasingly mandated “data-driven” campaigns instead of ones that are message-driven and data-informed. And over four straight cycles, Democrats have suffered historic losses.

Story Continued Below

After the 2008 election, Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from President Obama’s victory, ascribing his success to his having better data. He did have better data, and it helped, but I believe he won because he was the better candidate and had a better message, presented through better storytelling.

I’m not a Luddite. I did my graduate work in political science at MIT, and as a longtime Democratic strategist, I appreciate the role that data can play in winning campaigns. But I also know that data isn’t a replacement for a message; it’s a tool to focus and direct one.

We Democrats have allowed microtargeting to become microthinking. Each cycle, we speak to fewer and fewer people and have less and less to say. We all know the results: the loss of 63 seats and control of the House, the loss of 11 seats and control of the Senate, the loss of 13 governorships, the loss of over 900 state legislative seats and control of 27 state legislative chambers.

Yet despite losses on top of losses, we have continued to double down on data-driven campaigns at the expense of narrative framing and emotional storytelling.

Consider the lot of Bill Clinton. It has been widely reported that in 2016, Bill Clinton urged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to message on the economy to white working-class voters as well as to the “Rising American Electorate” (young voters, communities of color and single white women), but couldn’t get anyone to listen to him in Brooklyn. They had an algorithm that answered all questions. Theirs was a data-driven campaign. The campaign considered Bill to be old school—a storyteller, not data driven.

I feel his pain. And unless Democrats start to change things quickly, we’ll be feeling pain in elections yet to come.

***

Though the problem for Democrats is urgent, the challenge is not new. Before the clamor for a “data-driven” approach, the “best practices” embraced by much of the Democratic Party apparatus encouraged campaigns that were predominantly driven by issue bullet points. In 2000, for example, the Gore presidential campaign had no shortage of position papers, but it would be challenging (at best) to say what the campaign’s message was. In contrast, in Obama’s 2008 campaign, “Hope and Change” was not only a slogan, but a message frame through which all issues were presented.

Years ago, my political mentor taught me the problem with this approach, using a memorable metaphor: issues are to a campaign message what ornaments are to a Christmas tree, he said. Ornaments make the tree more festive, but without the tree, you don’t have a Christmas tree, no matter how many ornaments you have or how beautiful they are. Issues can advance the campaign’s story, but without a narrative frame, your campaign doesn’t have a message, no matter how many issue ads or position papers it puts forward.

Storytelling has been the most effective form of communication throughout the entirety of human history. And that is unlikely to change, given that experts in neurophysiology affirm that the neural pathway for stories is central to the way the human brain functions (“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written).

The scientific evidence of the effectiveness of storytelling is extensive. Consider the 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, in which Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff applied the analytic techniques from his field to politics, explaining that “all of what we know is physically embodied in our brains,” which process language through frames: “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.”

Convincing a voter—challenging an existing frame—is no small task. “When you hear a word, its frame (or collection of frames) is activated in your brain,” writes Lakoff. As a result, “if a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept.” How then to persuade voters? How can we get them to change the way they see the world? Tell a story.

Further evidence was put forward in 2007’s The Political Brain, by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen. “The political brain is an emotional brain,” Westen wrote, and the choice between electoral campaigns that run on an issue-by-issue debate versus those that embrace storytelling is stark: “You can slog it out for those few millimeters of cerebral turf that process facts, figures and policy statements. Or you can take your campaign to the broader neural electorate collecting delegates throughout the brain and targeting different emotional states with messages designed to maximize their appeal.”

For Democrats, a useful metaphor to frame our storytelling is that while conservatives believe we are each in our own small boat and it is up to each of us to make it on our own, progressive morality holds that we are all on a large boat and unless we maintain that boat properly, we will all sink together. That metaphor could serve as our narrative frame, and addressing issues within this frame—rather than as separate, unrelated bullet points—would allow us to present emotional stories using language that speaks to voters’ values.

Ironically, in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, Secretary Hillary Clinton presented a similar metaphor—American society as a village where everyone is interconnected. “From the moment [children] are born, they depend on a host of other ‘grown-ups,’” Clinton wrote, “untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly. … Each of us plays a part in every child’s life.” Yet in 2016, instead of using that as a narrative frame, the Clinton campaign presented health care, jobs, debt-free college, paid family leave and myriad other issues as emotion-free position papers without any connective thread tying them together.

Despite the wealth of available scientific findings, Democrats have all too often relied on position papers and issue ads instead of telling emotional stories, a failure that cost us many winnable races before 2010. Then things got much worse after Obama’s 2008 victory was credited simply to his being data-driven.

***

On the day after Donald Trump’s stunning, stinging victory over Hillary Clinton, President Obama surveyed the smoldering wreckage of the campaign in an interview with Rolling Stone. Obama recognized the problem when he highlighted the need for Democrats to “rethink our storytelling … [and] make it more interesting and more entertaining and more persuasive.”

He’s right. But that insight is not widely shared in Congress, where many members buy into the data-driven campaign model. Every congressperson, because they’ve won an election, feels like she or he is an expert in delivering a message. Conversely, when it comes to data, congresspeople hire “experts” who can supposedly provide magic formulas that can deliver victory. As a result, storytelling is ignored, message development gets reduced to testing messages in silos, and data salesmen run the show.

More broadly, we’ve continued down this data-driven campaign path because many leaders in the Democratic establishment in D.C. have become wedded to applying quantitative political science research to campaign efforts.

Consider the 2015 gubernatorial race in Kentucky, when the Democratic Governors Association used its financial clout to mandate that no get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts be included in its independent expenditures in the race, as the association’s “best practices” held that GOTV was the wrong strategy and that low turnout would benefit Democrats. Few Democrats who have ever worked on a successful campaign could take those assertions seriously, yet those were the “scientific” findings that were imposed. As a result, Democrats lost the race despite leading in the polls for more than a year.

The problem is that science, by definition, requires controlling for a single variable in a way that can be replicated by others, allowing over time for findings to be validated and a consensus to emerge. I believe that quantitative political science, at least as applied to the world of campaigns, is an oxymoron, as campaigns exist in a multivariate world.

In contrast, consider what Democrats and their allies have accomplished over three election cycles in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston and has a population larger than 25 states. There, through a combination of empowerment and values-driven messaging to Hispanic voters—with repetition rarely seen in programs aimed at base Democratic voters—we’ve helped drive low-propensity voters to turn out in numbers that mirror high-propensity voters. (Full disclosure: Working for an independent-expenditure campaign, my firm has been substantially involved in these efforts.) Last November, the program helped Democrats win every contested race in Harris County for the first time in a generation, including the district attorney, sheriff and 30 judicial races.

Democrats’ success in Harris County is an example of the appropriate approach to campaigns: They should be message-driven and data-informed. And after the 2016 election, it should seem self-evident that instead of doubling down on data-driven campaigns for the fifth election in a row, we Democrats need to refocus. That’s why I believe we would be better served if we paid less attention to quantitative political science and instead created a Storytellers Institute to teach campaign and committee staff, candidates and consultants the art and science of emotional storytelling, narrative construction and message framing.

As Donald Trump and Steve Bannon tear apart the foundations of our democracy, the future of the republic may depend on whether Democrats learn from the “fourth kick” of electoral disaster, begin to heed real science and seek to tell emotionally compelling stories that speak to the values of the American people.

If we do so, we can reframe our political dialogue and win elections again. If not, we have a fifth kick in store.